Harry was sick to the back teeth of school. So sick that sometimes he shoved his fingers down his throat for a little relief. He'd heard Neville was doing the same but for different reasons – reasons similar to why he never ate anymore. Harry had never seen Neville and Luna kiss but now it looked like she was constantly supporting him, even when they were sitting down her arm was always around him, his head on her shoulder, her fringe flopping over both their faces.

Ron and Hermione were as full-throttle as ever and Harry rarely spoke to them anymore since even when he did see them they were literally and figuratively wrapped around each-other like eternity rings.

Seamus drifted like a ghost in the absence of his best friend Dean. He was pale and shaking and always on the verge of tears. Harry sneered at him to his face and crossed his fingers for him when he wasn't looking; he now had a reputation to keep up.

Harry now hung with the Slytherins.

After that day with Yip his roommates had lent him his own leather jacket – along with a pair of skinny jeans so tight that they changed his walk completely; he now swaggered around with a surly expression, looking for all the world as if he'd been fighting on the Dark side last year, rather than the reason the good side had won.

Harry had no regrets – at least that's what he told himself. He couldn't care less that the Gryffindors now glared at him when he passed; that teachers accosted him with disappointed looks and detentions; that people now called him 'Potter' instead of 'The Chosen One'.

After all, that was all he'd ever wanted.

Right?

One thing that hadn't changed was that Harry still sent girls swooning. There was barely a female in the school that he couldn't make weak at the knees – but now Harry gladly took advantage of that.

Almost every night he brought a new girl to his dorm, commanding the Slytherins to sleep outside. He went straight in, straight out, and in the morning kicked her out. Occasionally he would take two at once just to prove he could.

Trix made her rounds of course and there were no locks on the door so many was the time she'd caught him if one of his friends couldn't Confund her quickly enough. She'd shriek and storm and drag him down to the dungeons. She called it 'late-night detention'. Harry called it torture. The Slytherins always came down to break him out (she'd confiscate his wand so he couldn't do it himself) so when Trix came back in the morning he'd be gone.

Harry was treading water above the system. He was close to drowning and he knew it, but he appeared to have become an adrenaline junkie. It wasn't about the sex; he didn't even enjoy it that much. It was about the thrill. The fun. The feel of it; being alive. Why hadn't he ever realized what a blast it was to be alive?

'Harry!'

'Yeah?'

'We're going out!'

'Be right there!'

Another perk of being a Slytherin: the trips to the nearby wizarding village, Kingsty, finally became interesting.

Harry and his new chums donned masks (which most of them had got from their incarcerated Death Eater dads), ran around with torches and set light to whatever could catch fire, whether inanimate or breathing. Harry no longer cared what or who he hurt because screams and flames crackling numbed his own pain. He would have set his fellow Slytherins on fire if he could; he just didn't care anymore.

Because despite what he thought; despite what anyone thought… Harry was nothing more than a dead man walking.